The American education system is tied deeply to the American dream. The idea that you can go to school, acquire a skill, graduate, and then obtain better opportunities is an integral part of the American dream. But what happens when there is a faulty mechanism mass producing “educated” beings with a lack of real instrumentation of what to do afterwards?

Today the idea of college is almost a mandatory notion after high school. Without a college degree, your opportunity to get the job of your dream diminishes greatly, and your opportunity to be promoted within any field also diminishes. I have experienced this first hand. After having graduated a high school whose main job was to produce college acceptance, I felt like college was the next natural step, and anything short of that would be a failure. But the reality is that college is not the next natural step for everyone. There are the lucky ones, myself included, that have had the opportunity to pursue higher education, but in this rigged system, students from lower-incomes rarely look at college as the next step after high school.

Though there are programs all over the country that are in place to make college a reality for people in low income neighborhoods, the reality is that those programs are not enough. Even when they get to college, the environment most people from low income communities come from is not bullet proof and is highly debilitated by the atmosphere at American colleges and universities. The atmosphere becomes increasingly more volatile the more prestigious and the more expensive the education.

So, what do we have here? A system that is producing student academic successes or a system that leads to high risks of failure in a society that doesn’t prepare anyone, and is highly classist? The latter sounds more correct, especially for people who don’t have the lineage of college graduates, don’t have the funds, or just don’t have the passion for a subject that requires them to go into debt without the guarantee that they will be employed after. So not only are those who don’t take the leap of faith to attend university, an already classist and biased system, suffering, but they also end up suffering if they don’t take the leap of faith.

Here we are, a society that thrives on the idea that person can succeed regardless of their economic background, yet we punish those, in a literal and metaphorical sense, who even attempt to better themselves, leaving little to be desired from a young age. What we need is a stronger curriculum, one that is skill focused and accessible to masses that will eventually even out the playing field, between those with or without college degrees, and between those with the lineage of success and those who are trying to break generational curses and start a new lineage themselves. Though of course this is easier said than done, a more legitimate commitment to educational reform must be taken by educational leaders for us to have a future. More jobs, an easy cop out to the everlasting problem, is not enough. We need a greater more inclusive American dream, and that will begin with educational reform.

By: Ambar Paredes

Disclaimer: The views, opinions and positions expressed by the authors and those providing comments, opinions on this website are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or positions of M-Lifestyle and their affiliates. M-Lifestyle does not claim ownership of any images used, unless otherwise specified.